“Car Racing Game” concept art research (2015-2016).

This is a selection of concept arts I made for pitching look and feel in a videgame project. I had to explore many different aesthetics based on client requirements and feedbacks. The main goal was to achieve a look that made a difference respect the mainstream fotorealistic style that this kind of game use in today’s industry. Taking strictyly photorealism as a design pole, I created a pure cartoon style as the other pole and moved between them.

I believe that this research is quite interesting because of all the many different artistic choices detailed.

Extreme cartoon development:

Generally, this kind of games use real world car models or fake them in order to make them recognizable models. One possibility was to explore a deformed style, playing with more and less mad designs. Despite the client was confident in a realistic shapes approach, this was a solution that worthed exploring.

The extreme cartoon style choosen as a design reference pole is depicted in these concept arts. Finally, exagerated and saturated sceneries merged with realistic but smoothed and slightly deformed cars. The proposal also includes a fake UI in order to provide a better judgement.

Many times I had to rework a concept art in order to provide with different lighting and atmosphere solutions.

Moderate cartoon development:

Moving in a intermediate step between photorealism and the previous cartoon style, I developed a soberer style but still cartoonish thanks to smoothed details and a proper outline over the game cars. Due to schedule constraints, we decided to recycle previous cartoonish concepts re-rendering them using a more realistic shape solution and color atmosphere. Those plus adding some fine details proved to be a valid time solving solution.

As happened with many of the previous concept arts, I was required to find many different lighting and atmosphere solutions.

Game engine look & feel tests:

The client was worried about how to traslade those aesthetics to the chosen game engine. At this point it was clear that the approbed shapes approach for the project was a realistic but smoothed and depured one, so then the variations had to be developed playing strictly with light, rendering and atmosphere. That is an easy goal using a game engine scene with the same meshes in each proposal and quicker than strictly painting each of them. My pipeline at this step consisted on creating a quick paint sketch to find a new approach and after that, trying to replicate it in the game engine using car and city meshes based on my own concepts. Only the game engine tests have enough quality to be shown here.

A great number of possibilities from strictly photorealism to more and more depured cartoonish or comic styles, demostrating that all the previous aesthetics and many more were realizable in a practical way were provided. In these images you can find different styles proposed, many of them related to animation, anime, comic books and graphic design.